“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off,’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official.
“It’s a Rorschach test, not a briefing. Because he is not a pleasant person to be around when he’s being briefed. It’s very difficult, and people are scared shitless of him.”
The official said, “He doesn’t take advice from anyone other than those few top aides, and it becomes a perfect storm because he just gets more and more isolated from their efforts to control it.
”The debate, however, was so dismal for Biden that nobody could ignore it. For as furiously as Biden’s advisers have pushed back on concerns about his age, the now 81-year-old president’s halting, soft-spoken and scattered responses to former President Donald Trump, 78, shattered the party’s magical thinking on the subject. That the president’s difficulties came as such a shock was largely the result of how effectively his top aides and the White House on the whole has, for three and a half years, kept him in a cocoon — far away from cameras, questions and more intense public scrutiny.
Even the president’s family, which gathered Sunday at Camp David for a previously scheduled portrait session with photographer Annie Leibovitz and private conversations about where to go from here, was pointing the finger at long-standing members of the senior team: senior adviser Anita Dunn, one of several proponents of the earlier debate, and former chief of staff Ron Klain, who oversaw the week of debate prep at Camp David.
But Biden himself told those aides he wasn’t blaming them, according to a person familiar with the conversation.
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